One of the main principals of jQuery is targeting dom elements using selectors and you can also updated properties. If you want to get a handle on a radio button in your form; he's an example, and here I'm also transforming the property to make it checked. $("input[name='options']").filter('.disagree.min input').prop('checked',true) You could make the targeting easier by putting an id on your inputs tags. Here I'm grabbing the radio group using the 'name' attribute and then filtering that using the classes on the label tag and then selecting the child input. As others have said. Radio buttons are grouped by the input name... so a group that shares a name... those buttons will toggle so that only one is selected. Here's an example of this code. https://jsfiddle.net/ecropolis/uLz3kmdb/